Yet again Bloglines aren’t answering emails to assist with either their crawlers invasive behavior on WPMU sites or their inability to successfully track some edublogs feeds for which I (and some users) have been contacting them for over a week.
The last couple oftimes posting here was the only way to get their attention (although they didn’t respond to the poem) so here’s hoping it works again.
And Paul, who was so helpful last time, seems to have left them… ho hum.
So unless you want us to advise every Edublogger not to use bloglines and recommend to all of their readers that they don’t too… which is really the only course of action left if you don’t help us… please get in touch guys!
Update: A very helpful bloglines engineer got in touch with me and they’ve applied a special script to set up a combined rate limit for 10 requests per second for the edublogs domain. Seems to be working nicely so far so you’re back in the good books Bloglines ;)
A yearon Bloglines continues to misbehave attempting to make hundreds to simultaneous connections through it’s crawler to WPMU hosts like edublogs – causing slowness and even crashing even on brand new clusters.
They don’t respond to emails about it and the only solution seems to be to limit their IP (65.214.44.29) to something like 20-40 concurrent connections – naturally massively slowing down the updates that get through.
It stinks and if they don’t do something about it we’re going to actively start asking the 100K+ users of edublogs sites to use Google Reader and discourage their readers /subscribers from using bloglines in favour of another RSS reader.
It’s a real shame as they were pioneers of web based aggregators and I used them for years but to be honest I’ve had enough.
Have discovered a little more about recent server issues… it seems that Bloglines, when allowed access to my server, is making ~230 parallel requests/second to it… which is naturally, along with all the other requests, killing everything.
Problem is that a very significant percentage of people hosted on the server – edublogs.org users included – are heavily bloglines dependant (as am I).
I’ve contacted them and emailed them but with no joy and as such have to ban them for the moment… but it’d really make my day if a Bloglines engineer could come along and figure how we could fix things up (bearing in mind I’m going to sleep now). Dunno if they’ve ramped up their crawler but it needs sorting soon.
Am feeling like seriously eating my words about centralised RSS aggregation systems as Bloglines has just decided not to accept feeds from any site hosted on my servers… seriously, doesn’t matter whether you’re on WPMU or WP or the URL… it just isn’t updating anything at all!!!
Have no idea why either, no updates or upgrades have been made at my end whatsoever… it’s like being IP banned or something, very very odd :( Have pinged them with some very concerned support requests but it says they will take up to two days to get to them… so am hoping that someone out there – who isn’t reading this by bloglines – might be able to hurry stuff up, get things going… we’re talking of tens of thousands of blogs across all the sites and it needs fixing now!
Update: Sigh, the tech team thought bloglines was some sort of spambot and blocked it… all back to normal now… v impressed at the response time from Bloglines though, a comment by a Bloglines engineer within 3 hours of this post – I’m back in love again :)
Blimey I thought, I must’ve been pretty obnoxious over the last few days as I saw my Bloglines subscribers dip from 161 to 156… a bit like last week when I lost a couple too… and then I had a look at Will and noticed that he’s gone from 1027 to 971 and felt a bit better as no-one is going to be unsubscribing from him hence the first AskJeeves-Bloglines move must be to cull non-used accounts… anyone know if that’s accurate?
Seems like Bloglines is having some trouble with Manila RSS feeds, Anne Davis having experienced a similar fate to Seb who disappeared of my radar a bit back only to pop up in a pubsub alive and kicking (thank god I have vanity feeds eh :O)
I have a web 2.0 sin to admit to, I just don’t get OPML.
Sure, there are cool things you can do with it – importing / exporting reading lists and the other capacities Steve Rubel mentions including seeing who subscribes to what on a group level. Heck, back in March 2004 I spent a fair bit of time getting excited about possible applications in libraries!
What I didn’t get then though (heady days of netopianism) was that it was (and is), IMO, fundamentally flawed logic. People don’t really do anything, let alone share, unless they’ve got a very good reason for doing it. Sure you might help out the community, sure you might be able to serendipitously find loadsa cool blogs, sure it’s another kind of glue that binds us (hypertext and undertext anyone?)… but why the heck would I bother? Answer: Not many people did, nice experiment, things moved on.
But now of course a very high percentage of people are using web based aggregators and with the online desktop on the tip of everything I’d be pretty comfortable in suggesting that within 10 years 99%+ of aggregation will be something that we technically do ‘online’. This means we won’t have to ‘share’ any more, we’ll just have to do our thing and the system will share and compare and do all those funky things for us, which is great.
But what do you need to happen for this to become a reality in the first place and what will you get out of it in the end if it does? Well, I – for one – am not entirely convinced that we’re gonna see MSN, Yahoo, Ask, Google etc. etc. saying ‘For sure Dave, we’ve got all this great data (which naturally we all agree on standards for) and we’re just itching to share it with everyone else’, and then (I imagine) there would have to be someone who hosts / runs this great feed-house, and get something reasonable out of it – like Automatic with Akismet – you can have a go at wiping out comment spam because there’s a great business model there… but with OPML?
I mean there’d be some great data on who’s most read – but haven’t we got fairlygoodways of estimating or showing that already? And you’d be able to see who reads the same kind of stuff to you – perhaps some value in a Uni department but across the web… hmmm – and there’d be another way of looking at a very particular number of blog stats… but where’s the killer attention ap here?
SpamPal2 Blog – A development log for the SpamPal project As well as the civil rights leader there’s another James Farmer out there who’s also far more significant than me as the creator of SpamPal. And he isn’t that well. So best wishes James, hope you’re back to fighting spam again soon!
Telegraph Blogs The first major online newspaper to integrate with Digg, del.icio.us, Blinklist, Reddit, Newsvine& Ma.gnolia (via journalism.co.uk) – now I wonder how they’re gonna attract some more traffic…
Mike Davidson: Hacking A More Tasteful MySpace The question is, naturally, why don’t they make it a bit nicer in the first place? But then how important are aesthetics? Seriously. Part of me is starting to think that the worse things look the better they tend to work – in both explaining themselves and in terms of downright plain functionality – Bloglines for example.
Am feeling like seriously eating my words about centralised RSS aggregation systems as 
I have a web 2.0 sin to admit to, I just don’t get OPML.